July 1, 2020
THOUGHT LEADER (self-reference alert):
Happy 90th Birthday to an Underappreciated American Scholar (Walter E. Williams, July 01, 2020, Daily Signal)
My colleague not only writes when you and I are asleep or enjoying ourselves, but he might write with two hands.Sowell cares about people. He believes that compassionate policy requires dispassionate analysis. He takes seriously the admonition given to physicians: "primum non nocere" (first, do no harm).In many respects, Sowell is an Austrian economist like the great Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, who often talked about elites and their "pretense of knowledge."These are people who believe that they have the ability and knowledge to organize society in a way better than people left to their own devices--what Hayek called the fatal conceit. Their vision requires the use of the coercive powers of government.In my book, Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest economist-philosophers of our age, and I am proud to say that he is one of my best friends. Sowell demonstrates something that is uniquely American; namely, just because you know where a person ended up in life, you cannot be sure about where he started.
One of the most important ways in which he influenced my own thinking was unintended. In writing about the benefits of immigration he noted that modern African, Haitian and other black immigrants succeed at similar levels as European, Asian or others. And he argued that what makes the historic black underclass unique in America is that slaves were denied the normal immigrant experience with unsurprising knock-on effects. It is the implicit case for reparations.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 1, 2020 12:00 AM